 I'm Stephen Cox. I'm a sculptor. I'm English. And I'm generally known for working in stone. And in particular, I'm very, very interested in working with the hardest stones in the world, in particular imperial porphyry. Now you've seen Stephen Cox discuss peregrine sentinel, and I wanted to bring in a few more views of that sculpture that I didn't capture in the video that I made when I was there in his house. So here we're looking at the front and sides of peregrine sentinel, and you can see the wonderful variety of textures. One of the things that Stephen emphasizes in his work is the relationship that he has with the material. And it's a great deal of respect, as I'm sure you've noticed by now, for what it took to form this imperial porphyry, for how rare it is, for how difficult it is to work, and for the weight of history and symbolism that it has. And so a lot of that is reflected here. You might notice the wonderful sort of abstracted bird shape, but you might also notice that the form here also resembles that of a female figure. A lot of his work tends to explore really sort of classic abstract forms that could be read in a multitude of ways. And the other thing I want you to notice is the attention being played to different textures and to sort of responding to the different faces of the stone. So here we see those views, and here we have a slightly better detail. Here we're looking at the side of the sculpture and a detail of the front and top. You can see the unfinished texture that we have at the top of the sculpture and also down at the very foot of the sculpture. And then the entire back has been left in that sort of unfinished broken state that you would have for stone coming directly from the quarry. I love this particular detail of the stone in Peregrine Sentinel. Here this is at the base of the sculpture and you can see this very rough, unfinished piece of the sculpture. And it shows all of those working marks and you can get a sense from this of just how difficult it is to work these hard stones like porphyry, basalt, and diorite. The normal tools and techniques that would work on softer stones like the alabaster and marble we'll cover later are completely ineffective. They're completely ineffective against this sort of stone. It all has to be worked with sort of punches perpendicularly against the stone and those tools wear out very much more quickly even if you're using power assisted tools. The process is much, much slower. So there's a real awareness here and a desire to show the evidence of the difficulty of that working. Here's a short video from Steven's sculpture yard and we're looking at a piece that is a similar size and shape to Peregrine Sentinel and you can see here how he has marked up some of the forms on the stone with the intent of carving in and creating a finished sculpture. Here's Steven with one of his larger and earlier pieces in Imperial Porphyry. This is a work called Dreadnaught and it's a piece in which he's been exploring the Imperial Porphyry and sort of its condition and the things that have happened to it over its history. The pits and hollows that you see in this work are from pieces of tuff that he gouged out and dug out of this enormous piece of Imperial Porphyry. It also had a split down the middle and that was then gilded by Steven. You can see that gold shining in the sun and then if you notice there are a bunch of sort of parallel stripes on the face of this piece and those are tool marks from the Roman quarrymen who were originally sort of roughing out this piece. It was ultimately abandoned in the quarry until Steven brought it back to Britain and worked with it. Now I'm showing you a closer view of Dreadnaught and you can see that line of gold there to call your attention to that split in the porphyry and that may well be why the Romans abandoned it in the quarry. Also all of those large inclusions of tuff might have made this a less desirable piece of stone for the Roman masons but you can see their initial marks from drills that they used to kind of cut down in and used to split the stone and we'll see some wedge marks on the other side in just a moment. Here on the backside of Dreadnaught you can see some of those tuff inclusions that haven't been removed by Steven. They look like big chunks of marshmallow in a jello salad for example and more of those sort of drill marks from the Romans. There are a few sort of square cut marks too that are evidence of wedges that would have been driven in as part of the stone splitting process and what I think is so interesting about Steven Cox and his work is that for one thing he's one of the only sculptors currently working in these hard stones today. His assistant Tim is following in his footsteps in a way using basalt and deliberately working with hard stones but these are materials that in many ways are materials of the past not of the present and in Steven Cox's work we see a dialogue between a present day sculptor and these very ancient important materials. He has tremendous respect for them and the work that he does represents a sort of conversation that he has with these materials and when you examine his work and really look at it and we'll see some more work when we get to alabaster you really get a sense, a better sense of those materials thanks to Steven's intervention as a sculptor.